SHORTHAND, STZNOGRAPIII. When mankind had acquired a tolerable degree of expertness and exactness in the use of letters by the ordinary modes of writing, it became the study of the curious to invent more concise methods of denot ing the same words or phrases. Hence sundry schemes of abbreviation for com pendious writing were devised; and the learned of different nations introduced them into their respective languages, ac cording as more skill and greater per fection in writing them were acquired.
Buxtorf has written a learned history of Hebrew abbreviations, as • key to under stand the Rabbinical authors. Some of them are the incipient letters of several words, joined together as one, and mark ed at the top with points; others are the final letters of words and others, again, are contracted words, wherein two or three letters are made to denote an entire word. The Jews were particularly par tial to these methods of abbreviation, to which they added a few arbitrary charac ters, to express certain proper names, such as God, Jehovah, &c.
This kind of writing was, by degrees, introduced, and successfully practised among the Greeks. Nicolai gives it as his opinion that Xenophon first taught the Greeks to write by certain notes, in the nature of characters. Laertius confirms this opinion, and particularly mentions two methods of short writing, ris. one by contractions of words, and the other by arbitrary marks. This.art was practised among the Romans at an early period. Indeed the first invention of a system of short-hand, by which the writer was ena bled to follow the most rapid speaker, has been ascribed by some to the poet Ennius, and it is said that it was after wards improved by Tyro, Cicero's freed man; and still more so by Seneca. Ennius began the practice with one thousand one hundred marks of his own contriv ance. As an elucidation of this subject, and to show in what estimation this art was held among the Romans, we may briefly notice two of the Roman Em perors, of very opposite characters ; Caligula, and Titus Vespasian. It was deemed a great defect in one of them, to be ignorant of short-band ; and a perfec tion in the other, to be acquainted with this highly useful and ingenious art.
Caligula was a man guilty of so many vices, that it might be imagined his igno rance of short-hand would not have fallen under the notice of an historian. And yet Suetonius mentions it as something remarkable, that he who was so expert in other matters, and wanted not capacity and parts, was totally ignorant of short hand. Titus Vespasian, on the contrary, was remarkable for writing short-band exceedingly, swift. He was indeed a true lover of the art, and made it not only his business, but his diversion. It afforded him great pleasure to get his amanuenses together, and entertain him self with trying which of them could write fastest ; so that by common prac tice, he acquired such a command of hand, and such a facility in imitation, that be was wont to joke upon himself and say, what a special counterfeit he should have made.
The different schemes of shorthand formerly used, were probably much of the same nature, exceedingly arbitrary, and, for the most part unintelligible to any but those who practised them ; and, for that reason, were soon forgotten and destroyed. We may guess at the fate they generally experienced, by two books of shorthand mentioned by Trithemius. The first was a dictionary of short-hand, which he bought of an abbot, who was a doctor of law, for a few pence, to the great satisfaction of the community to which he belonged, who had ordered the short-hand marks to be erased, for the sake of the parchment on which they were written. The other was a short hand copy of the book of Psalms, which he, met with in another monastery, where the learned monks had inscribed upon it, by way of title, " A Psalter of the Arme nia Language !" Several copies of a dic tionary and psalter, in the Roman short hand, are mentioned as extant in different libraries; but they are, in general, the same method, as may be judged by the accounts 6f those who mention them, and also from the appearance of the hand writing of an old short-hand psalter, in the library of St. Germain's at Paris, a few pages from which were transcribed for the use of the writer of these observa tions.